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Monday, November 18, 2013

A month before Halloween this year, I asked my kids what they wanted to be. To my surprise, they all said, "A monster." I toyed with this idea for awhile, but wasn't finding many non-scary off-the-shelf monster costumes, nor very many do-it-yourself alternatives. So finally I sat down, pulled up target.com, navigated to the costume page, and said, "Why don't you pick something from here?" Within 10 minutes, they had it narrowed down. Logan wanted to be a ninja and Savannah wanted to be a mermaid. (Izzy and Sawyer are still young enough that they get to be whatever I want them to be, which this year was whatever I could dig out of the dress up box.) We ended up not getting the costumes at Target, thanks to my mom finding them both at Costco, but in the end I'm pretty sure everyone was pleased with their get up. Phew! Another year down!

We started off our festivities with our ward trunk-or-treat and chili cook-off. I am usually the lame car at trunk-or-treats with absolutely no decorations whatsoever, but I decided to try something simple this year. I think it's kind of great.

Halloween itself was a little bit of a disaster. I doubt the kids would think so, but I was a wreck by the end of the day. I think it was just the result of trying to do too much. It started when I got a phone call from the school saying Savannah had had an accident in her costume. Apparently shimmying out of her mermaid tail in time to make it to the toilet was a bit too challenging. So I ran over to the school, picked up her costume, brought it home and washed it, dried it with a hair dryer, then took it back to school in time for her class party. Both kids had parties at the same time, so Isabelle, Sawyer, and I ducked back and forth between the two to be at both as much as possible.

After school I tried to hurry and make some donut dough, thinking that would be a fun thing to eat on Halloween. What I didn't think is that maybe making homemade donuts for the first time ever was not a good idea on an already busy holiday. By this time it had started raining, putting an additional damper on our plans. We pushed on, though, and made our way to the Walmart home office, where our kids trick-or-treated through miles of cubicles. I have to give Jeff some credit here. He was in Oklahoma City the morning of Halloween, and had to be back the day after, but didn't want to miss being with the kids on Halloween, so he drove all the way home (3.5 hours) to be there for the evening activities, just to turn around and drive back early the next morning.

It stopped raining around 5, so I made the kids go back outside for another round of pictures. Sawyer was starving/screaming, Isabelle was completely uncooperative, but I was determined to get some photos. (See what I do for you, blog?)

We finally bribed Izzy with some chocolate to take a few pictures. Sorry for the nasty chewed up chocolate mouth shot. Just keeping it real.

By this time we were all starving, but I had no plans whatsoever for dinner (besides the donuts-- not super nutritious). We ended up with a take-and-bake pizza which took longer than we thought to bake and made us miss trick-or-treating with our neighbor friends. Eventually we bundled up and hit up all of 5 houses before calling it a night. We then returned to our pumpkin-less house (second year in a row we've failed to carve pumpkins) to eat overcooked donuts and binge on candy.

I'm pretty sure our kids had a blast, so I guess it wasn't such a failure. It was just a LONG day all around, as it always is and probably always will be. Oh well. Happy Halloween!